5/10/23
Newsletter #332
The Crack of Dawn
To Kill a Mockingbird is the story is about the Finch family – Atticus, Scout and Jem – and is a fictionalized version of the family of the author, Harper Lee. Their next-door-neighbors have a cousin who stays with them in the summer, a 12-year-old boy named Dill. The character of Dill was based on the author, Truman Capote. Harper Lee and Truman Capote were friends for the rest of their lives. The photograph of Harper Lee on the back of the 1st edition of To Kill a Mockingbird was taken by Truman Capote. Truman Capote’s book, In Cold Blood, is co-dedicated to Harper Lee.
Truman Capote began writing when he was eight years old. His short stories started being published in major magazines, like The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, when he was nineteen. In 1945 when he was twenty, his story, Miriam, was published in Mademoiselle and made him well-known in literary circles. When his first short story collection, Other Voices, Other Rooms, came out in 1948, it was a big deal, won awards, and Truman Capote became a literary darling at the age of twenty-three.
Lo, I must insert myself into the story. My father had a big collection of paperback books from the late-1940s (when paperbacks first started coming out), through the 1950s, and into the early ‘60s, when he stopped reading books. I began rooting through those books when I was nine (and at some point, alphabetized them), came across Other Voices, Other Rooms, read it and liked it, so I’ve been a Truman Capote fan my whole life.
In the early 1960s Capote began experimenting with the demarcation line between fiction and non-fiction, which resulted in his biggest-selling book, In Cold Blood. What Capote did was to insert himself into an unfolding real life dramatic situation, thus making him a character in the story. The idea was so intriguing that Norman Mailer followed up on it with his book, Armies of the Night (which won all the literary awards that year) and is in two parts: The Novel as History and History as a Novel. Years later, Mailer followed up on that with his Pulitzer Prize-winning “novel,” The Executioner’s Song, about the murderer, Gary Gilmore, and his subsequent execution. The book is subtitled, “A True Life Novel,” and he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, except that it’s a true story. What does this mean? Good question.
Near the end of his life – Truman Capote lived to be 59 – he took one more crack at the true life novel. He was unable to get a full-length book out of it, so it’s included in the short story collection, Music for Chameleons, which I just reread.
That story, which is listed as non-fiction, is called Handcarved Coffins, and is about a series of murders in Texas in the 1970s. What made these killings unique was that there seemed to be no connection between any of the victims in any way, plus all the victims received a handcarved coffin the size of a shoe that contained a recent photo of them, taken without their knowledge. The killings had been occurring at random times for years and the case remained unsolved.
Truman Capote inserted himself into the story by interviewing, then befriending the last official assigned to the still-open case from the Texas State Bureau of Investigation.
It’s a good story and Capote was a fine writer. However, the reason I’ve taken you all the way down this road is for pure sensationalism. Of the many movies and TV shows we all see about killers all the time, I found this method of murder in Handcarved Coffins particularly inventive, and more grisly and awful than usual.
The killer in this true story was killing random people in random Texas locations for no apparent reason. On August 10, 1970, the first victims, George and Amelia Roberts, came out in the morning and got into their car. Here is how the detective described it:
“They each entered the car through separate doors, and as soon as they were inside – wam! A tangle of rattlesnakes hit them like lightning. We found nine big rattlers inside the car. All of them had been injected with amphetamine; they were crazy, they bit the Robertses everywhere: neck, arms, ears, cheeks, hands. Poor people. Their heads were huge and swollen like Halloween pumpkins painted green. They must have died almost instantly. I hope so. That’s one hope I really hope.”
The detective went on to explain how they had tracked down the purchase of the snakes from a rattlesnake farm in Nogales. He then explained how the rattlesnakes were handled and hung up in a certain way so that they could be injected with the amphetamine.
In any case, that really happened, and for no reason.
With that inspirational tale, have a nice day.